Bad Judgment: Poems - Softcover

Calbert, Cathleen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1889330248 ISBN 13: 9781889330242

Publisher: Sarabande Books, 1998

Synopsis

Bad Judgment is Cathleen Calbert's second collection of poems. Calbert offers feminist fables appropriate to the millennium: tales of when the world lost meaning, of falling in love in an age of indeterminacy. Her sense of comic absurdity is uncanny: in one poem, the speaker attends a costume party as a dead debutante; in another, facile positivism is shredded by satire.

In poems that balance realistic and surrealistic narratives, irony and sentiment, Calbert records the journey of a woman reeling from a number of losses-her youth, the death of a close friend, religious faith-toward love and marriage. These poems speak directly of and from the self, and in so doing echo Whitman's conversational grace. Calbert writes an updated feminist song of herself, a song that celebrates the pleasure of being the modern "woman as wild card, as other/than wife, mother, lover, friend," the woman who delights in forging herself with wit and wisdom.

The title poem, "Bad Judgment," shows how the little lies we tell ourselves and others can create lives of bad faith, and as much as she would like to be consoled for her losses, reassured about the permanence of her recompenses, Calbert does not seek the easy balm of dogma. Instead of grace or God, per se, she suggests, we have perspective. And Calbert shows that we are blessed, in our quest for simplifying principles, to discover the exceptional.

Cathleen Calbert is the author of one previous collection of poetry, Lessons in Space, published by the University Press of Florida in 1997. She was a recipient of The Nation Discovery Prize in 1991, the Gordon Barber Memorial Award of The Poetry Society of America in 1994, and a writing fellowship from The Rhode Island State Council for the Arts in 1995. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1995, Feminist Studies, The Hudson Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is an Associate Professor at Rhode Island College.

"Between 'Don't try anything!' and 'She'll try anything!' fall (or rise: depending on her mood) Cathy Calbert's startling new poems, so cool, so speculative, so disabused, so warm. Our colloquial

About this title

From the Publisher

Sarabande Books announces the February 1999 release of Bad Judgment, Cathleen Calbert's second collection of poems. This collection offers feminist fables appropriate to the millennium: tales of when the world lost meaning, of falling in love in an age of indeterminacy. Her sense of comic absurdity is uncanny: in one poem, the speaker attends a costume party as a dead debutante; in another, facile positivism is shredded by satire. The title poem, "Bad Judgment," shows how the little lies we tell ourselves and others can create lives of bad faith, and as much as she would like to be consoled for her losses, reassured about the permanence of her recompenses, Calbert does not seek the easy balm of dogma. Instead of grace or God, per se, she suggests, we have perspective. And Calbert shows that we are blessed, in our quest for simplifying principles, to discover the exceptional.

From the Author

Question: Your poems are decidedly feminist yet so-called "traditional" women's roles-especially that of wife-are appealingly portrayed. What makes it possible, in your poems, to escape the "camps" of other versions of feminism?

Calber Answers: "Wow, I dream about having to justify my life. It's an interesting sensation being asked to do so in print. Yes, I am a feminist. I will be one until women have achieved legal, political, social, sexual, and economic equality with men. Then I will be happy to embrace a 'post-feminist' phase of history. Maybe this will occur sometime around the next Millennium (I'm talking 3001). Thus, I probably will end up like an old socialist grandfather rocking away angrily in his chair. However, as much as I admire radical feminists and lesbian separatists, I am heterosexual, and, as one friend put it, I always have been a femme. I am not ideologically pure. If I were, I don't think I would have married. I especially feel ambivalent about the rights that the state accords to me because of my married status when same-sex partners are not allowed those privileges. But I am attracted to ritual, to vows, undoubtedly also due to Catholicism (it's great being able to blame so much on the Church). I wanted both of us legally bound as well, both for straightforward economic reasons and for less straightforward emotional ones (he is mine). I believe that the marriage has been a mix of orthodoxy and attempts at undermining that. It is contradictory. Undoubtedly, the poems which trace the trajectory of our romance into matrimony are as well. Perhaps they are about an attempt to live within these contradictions. What can I say? Reader, I married him. I found a great wedding dress too."

Edition details

• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1889330248
• ISBN 13: 9781889330242
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72